Nuclear power is expected to become a source of energy being able to cover a significant part of the world energetic demand in the future. But its big disadvantage, the risk of the spent nuclear fuel, has to be solved. The Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) - SPHINX (SPent Hot fuel Incinerator by Neutron fluX) concept solves this principal problem of spent fuel treatment by means of so called nuclear incineration.
It means burning of fissionable part of its inventory and transmutation of other problematic radionuclides by use of nuclear reactions with neutrons in a MSR - SPHINX system. This reactor system is an actinide burner (most in resonance neutron spectrum) and a radionuclide transmuter in a well-thermalized neutron spectrum.
The R&D program of MSR - SPHINX concept contains reactor physical, chemical (partitioning) and structural material parts. In the frame of physical part, there are besides computational analyses also experimental activities involved in the program, which serves for a validation of computer codes and finally for a verification of design inputs for designing of a demonstration unit of the MSR-type. The experimental program has been focused, in its first stage, on a short-term irradiation of small size samples of molten-salt systems as well as structural materials proposed for the MSR blanket in the field of high neutron flux of research reactors.
The proposed next stage of the program will focus on a large-scale experimental verification of design inputs by use of MSR-type inserting zones into the existing light water moderated experimental reactor LR-0, which may allow to modify it to experimental zero power salt reactor SR-0. There will be a detail description of the proposed program given in the paper together with the so far performed experiments and their first results. These realized experiments help us also to verify computational codes used, and to recognize some anomalies related to molten fluorides utilization.